


Gutter

by Irelando



Category: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Everyone Lives/Nobody Dies, Comfort/Angst, Gen, Protect Bodhi Rook 2k17
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-16
Updated: 2017-01-16
Packaged: 2018-09-17 20:44:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,071
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9343121
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Irelando/pseuds/Irelando
Summary: Gutter (v.)to burn low or to be blown so as to be nearly extinguished.(aka: Bodhi thought he was okay after Bor Gullet. He was wrong. On the bright side, he has his friends to look after him.)





	

**Author's Note:**

> This is... sort of part of the 'Kindling' verse? It uses that timeline as a base, but I don't know if I'm considering it 'canon' yet. You don't have to read that to read this, though!
> 
> Content warning for ptsd-ish symptoms.

The first time it happens, they’re in the shuttle on the way back to Yavin with a newly-resurrected Kaytoo.

“It’s a proprietary thing,” Bodhi’s telling Jyn, “See, ship manufacturers don’t want untrained pilots to be able to fly their ships – think of all the trouble hyperspace jumps can be if you don’t calculate them properly – so they don’t use labels. That way, you have to…”

He trails off.

“Have to what?” Jyn prompts absently, poking at the nav computer.

He doesn’t answer. Jyn looks up. “Bodhi?”

He’s frozen, his eyes unfocused, mouth a little slack.

“Bodhi?” she says again, more urgently.

Nothing.

A cold thrill of fear goes through her. They’re very far from home, and she’s about as far from a medic as you’re likely to get. “Cassian,” she yells, making no attempt to hide the trace of panic in her voice. She stands up, hesitates. Her first instinct is to touch him, grab his shoulders and try to shake him out of whatever fugue he’s in, but without knowing what’s wrong she’s hesitant to risk it.

“Bodhi?” she tries, “Can you hear me? Bodhi Rook, you’re scaring the bantha shit out of me and I’d really appreciate if you’d snap out of it right about now!”

Nothing. But then Cassian’s there, wheezing slightly and favoring his side. “What happened?”

Jyn gives a helpless little shrug. “Nothing? We were talking, and then he just…”

Cassian nudges her out of the way to get a look at Bodhi’s face. He sucks in a breath. “I’ve seen this before.”

“You have?” Jyn asks.

“Yeah,” he says, glancing at her. “On Jedha.” He leans closer to Bodhi. “Bodhi, wake up. You’re on the ship. You’re safe.”

“I tried that,” Jyn says, a little snappishly. She flushes. “Sorry.” Cassian waves the apology off.

Still no response. Tentatively, Cassian puts his hands on Bodhi’s face, turns it to try and catch the pilot’s eyes. “Bodhi. Come on. Come back. You’re on Rogue One, you’re safe.”

At ‘Rogue One’, Bodhi twitches. Jyn leans closer. “It’s working. Rogue One, Bodhi, remember? Scarif? You came up with the name. Rogue One. Pretty clever.” She keeps up the stream of words until Bodhi’s eyes slowly start to focus on Cassian.

“Rogue One,” he mutters.

“Yeah,” Cassian says, naked relief on his face. “That’s us, remember?”

“I remember,” Bodhi says, still a little vague. He shakes his head slightly, and Cassian lets go. It takes another tense minute for the fogginess to completely clear from Bodhi’s eyes, and the pilot puts a hand to his head. “What happened?”

“You tell us,” Cassian says.

“You just sort of… blanked out,” Jyn says.

“Like on Jedha,” Cassian adds. “In the cell.”

Something shutters behind Bodhi’s eyes. He glances at Jyn, then away. “Oh. Right.”

A silence passes. Finally, Jyn tries, “Do you want to talk about it?”

Bodhi gives her a look that’s almost guilty. He shakes his head.

“Maybe you should see a medic,” Cassian says, exchanging a glance of his own with Jyn.

Another head shake.

“Okay,” Cassian says uncertainly.

“How _can_ we help?” Jyn says.

Bodhi wrings his hands. “I can handle it,” he says. “You don’t need to worry.”

Cassian raises his eyebrows. “We’re a team,” he says. “We’re gonna worry.”

“Please,” Jyn says. “If there’s some way we can help, tell us.”

Bodhi bites his lip. “I guess… just, what you just did. Talk to me. It helps.”

Both of them nod. “What about touching?” Cassian asks. “Good or bad?”

Bodhi hesitates. “Good? I think?”

“Okay,” Jyn says, and gives him a hesitant smile. “We can do that.”

“If you change your mind…” Cassian says, “About talking about it.”

Bodhi manages a weak smile. “Yeah. Thanks.”

They’re all silent for a moment. Cassian’s favoring his side, so Jyn casually slips out of her seat. He gives her a look, but grudgingly settles into it.

“So,” Jyn says, as brightly as she can manage. “You were telling me about ship manufacturers and their utter disdain for labels.”

She’s not all that interested anymore, more concerned with what’s going on inside her friend’s head (she doesn’t have many, so she’d like to keep the ones she has, thank you very much), but he looks so grateful as he launches back into his spiel that she’s willing to wait.

 _Damnit, Saw,_ she thinks. _Who else did you break?_

\--

With Bodhi’s permission, they fill in Baze and Chirrut on the situation, so that as long as one of them is around, he won’t have to go through whatever it is alone. Some small part of Jyn hopes that the destruction of the Death Star will help, will ease whatever is eating at him, but it doesn’t. If anything, in the week following the victory at Yavin, he gets worse.

Baze finds him staring vaguely down at his slowly-congealing breakfast two mornings after. The Guardian plunks himself down on the bench next to Bodhi, close enough that his broad shoulders brush the pilot’s scrawny ones, and grumbles about how much work his new blaster is going to need until Bodhi rouses enough to start offering suggestions on improving the firing rate.

Jyn’s keeping him company while he works on an X-wing when she hears a sudden clatter. She finds him curled in a ball underneath the ship, his wrench forgotten on the ground beside him. He wakes up with his head resting on her leg, her hands tentatively smoothing over his hair as she recounts stories of her time in prison.

Chirrut senses an attack from halfway across the base, a vague feeling of a dark cloud on the horizon. He politely excuses himself to his new sparring partner and tracks Bodhi down in a corner of a back hallway. He puts his hands on the pilot’s shoulders and prays until the younger man shivers awake.

Cassian nearly trips over him as he rounds the corner of the new U-wing they’re tuning up, Bodhi huddled up under an engine with his head in his hands. Cassian takes those hands, chafes them gently between his own, and talks about how in all his time as a Fulcrum agent he doesn’t think he’s seen any recruit as brave as Bodhi.

He’s not sleeping. He doesn’t complain, but they can all see it. The bags under Bodhi’s eyes get deeper, darker. Chief Adin corners Jyn in the hallway and complains about finding Bodhi in the landing bay in the middle of the night, but it’s a thin disguise for the concern Jyn can hear in her voice.

Jyn and Cassian awake one night to the sound of screaming, high and terrified and agonized. By the time they get to Bodhi’s room, he’s down to whimpers, soaked in sweat, nearly fetal, his hands clawing at the sides of his head. Jyn takes his hands, rubs her fingers across his pilot’s calluses, while Cassian talks about everything and nothing at all.

It takes a long time, this time, for Bodhi to come out of it. To the point where Jyn’s starting to think that taking him to the medbay might be unavoidable. But finally, the pilot’s quiet cries trail off, and the clouds retreat from his eyes. He squeezes Jyn’s hands once and pulls his away to rub at his face.

“It’s getting worse,” Cassian says.

Bodhi drops his hands, pushes himself slowly up to a sit. He stares hard at the bedspread. “I know.”

“Maybe you should see the medic,” Jyn says.

Bodhi shakes his head. “No. There’s nothing—it’s all in my head. I can get through it.”

“It being in your head doesn’t make it less real,” Jyn says.

“And you don’t have to do it alone,” Cassian adds.

Bodhi looks up at them. He looks _exhausted_ , like the barest puff of a breeze would knock him right over. He opens his mouth. Closes it, and casts another guilty glance at Jyn.

 _Oh_ , Jyn thinks. It’s just a hunch, but it’s worth a shot if it’ll get him to open up. “What did Saw do to you, Bodhi?” Cassian glances at her, but doesn’t interject.

Bodhi’s shoulders tense, just a little. “I know he was your… he was important to you. I don’t want to…”

Jyn is sorely tempted to smack him upside the head, but he looks so fragile that she checks the impulse. “Saw abandoned me in a bunker when I was still a kid,” she says, “I loved him, sure, but he was no saint. What did he _do_ , Bodhi?”

A quiet cough. “May we join you?” Chirrut asks from the doorway, a half-asleep Baze looming over his shoulder. Jyn starts, but Bodhi doesn’t look surprised at the Guardians’ entrance.

“Sure,” he says after a moment. “If I’m gonna talk about it, I’d rather just do it once.”

They arrange themselves around him. Jyn scoots onto the bed to sit beside him, with Cassian on his other side. Baze drags a chair over from the side of the room, props his feet up on the bed, and Chirrut perches comfortably on the edge of the cot.

And they wait.

And wait. 

When the dam finally breaks, it does so with force. 

“He wouldn’t _listen_ ,” Bodhi says suddenly, vehemently, and Jyn doesn’t think she’s ever heard him sound so _angry_. “I kept trying to tell him: I had a message, I _defected_ to bring him a message, and nobody…” He clenches his hands. “He was supposed to be the good guys. But he threw me in a cell with this… thing, this blind tentacle something or other. He said it would prove if I was telling the truth. And that _thing_ crawled inside my head,” he shudders, hands going up to his temples, “slimy, slithering inside my brain, and it just. Won’t. Leave.” He presses the heels of his hands into his eyes. “It just keeps coming back, creeping around in there, and when it does I just…” He swallows. “I see Jedha, no horizon, and Scarif, people hurt and dead and dying and _screaming_ and I can’t remember the last time I felt _safe_.” He pulls his hands away, and his eyes are wet. “I just want to sleep.”

After a long moment, Chirrut nods slowly. “I felt it,” he says, with uncommon solemnity. “On Jedha. If the Force is water, that creature was oil. Not evil, but… alien.”

“No wonder it messed with your head,” Baze says.

“I just want to sleep,” Bodhi repeats, his voice quiet and desperate.

An idea occurs to Jyn, and she blurts it out without examining it first. “What about the Jedi? Luke, I mean. If it’s a Force thing…”

“Maybe he can help,” Cassian finishes, nodding.

“I don’t know if I want anyone else in my head,” Bodhi says. He takes a deep breath, and adds, “But if he can fix this…”

“I’ll ask him tomorrow morning,” Chirrut says decisively. “He will not do anything without your consent.”

Bodhi blows out a sigh. “Okay.” He hesitates. “But, tonight…”

“What?” Jyn prompts gently.

He stares at the bedspread again, worries the hem of his shirt between his hands. “Would you stay?” he asks. “I think it might help.”

Baze raises his eyebrows at the narrow single cot. “I don’t think we’re all going to fit,” he says.

Jyn and Cassian exchange a look. “Ours is big enough,” Cassian says. “Come on.”

They make a funny sight, traipsing down the hall in various states of undress, but it’s the wee hours of the morning and no one is around to see.

The bed isn’t huge, but it’s big enough. “Perks of being a major,” Cassian jokes around a yawn.

They pile onto the bed. Whatever awkwardness there might have been between them is soothed by what they’ve all been through together. Bodhi ends up curled up, his head on Jyn’s stomach and Cassian’s side warm against his back. Baze and Chirrut settle on the far side of Jyn, close enough that Bodhi can feel the heat from their bodies.

Bodhi drifts, surrounded by his friends, listening to the sound of Baze snoring and occasionally feeling Jyn vibrate beneath him with suppressed giggles at particularly loud ones.  It grounds him, makes it easier to push away the creeping feeling in his mind. Jyn’s fingers carding through his hair doesn’t hurt, either, he thinks sleepily.

If he has nightmares that night, he doesn’t remember them in the morning.  


End file.
